Episode 528: 4 Data-Driven Insights To Optimize Your Smart Shopping Campaigns #528

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burrows, one of the owners of EWR Digital. And my name is Matt Bertram. I'm the head strategist at EWR Digital. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. We're glad that you have joined us again. I've got notes here and I should probably pull them up. Oh, we have a sponsor. We're going to read the sponsor. If you've been listening last couple of podcasts, you've been hearing us talk about this sponsor, so we're pretty excited. And here we go. What can AWT make for your website? Scan your website for 100 plus common SEO issues that might be hurting its performance and search engines. Browse your website's backlink data and get actionable insights from your inbound and outbound link profiles. Learn what keywords your website ranks for and compare how you stack up against competitors in the search. That's the search engine results pages. Search engine journal wrote about AWT. It's hard to believe that something as useful as this free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is a killer service for free. You just go to ahrefs.com forward slash AWT. And that's A-H-R-E-F-S dot com forward slash AWT to check out that tool. So for those watching, we should have some like some kind of graphic zoom in or something like that because you actually started off and I was like, Ahrefs. It's Ahrefs. But AWT, not everybody like thinks about it like that. But AWT, which stands for something that's elongated, but basically it's their free component of their service. The free component has a bunch of features. The paid component's fantastic. It's a great tool for a lot of digital marketers out there. It is something that we use. It's part of our workflow. We are very happy to be sponsored by them and I'm ready to get into this podcast. Absolutely. All right. So Matt and I, we are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas. And before we jump into this article, I just want to ask one brief

thing. Could you go to EWRdigital.com forward slash review? That'll pull up our GMB page. Is it right? Yeah. Google my business page and leave us a review. Hopefully you make that review. It is so hard to do that on a, on a Zoom. No, I actually, this is what we're going to do. We're going to, we're going to take this to the next level. We're doing a lot about, uh, our, well, YouTube, um, you know, our, our YouTube, like we have actually two channels. So we got to like, you know, get all that cleaned up and like get real serious about this, but I want to get where the sounds like where you have a sound pad and I have a sound pad and we can like, you know, like add some flair to, to this, uh, this podcast some audio flair is we, we used to have a lot of fun. I mean, um, I actually saw this podcast recently where they had the camera looking like where they both looked like they were looking at each other and pulled up like a similar background, but you could tell like, it wasn't like, it didn't line up perfectly. Oh yeah. Yeah. It actually looked like they were in the same place at the same time. Yeah. So we might, we might have to do that. Although our office, we're getting a ton of new office furniture and it's taken forever. Okay. Yeah. The supply chain issues. Uh, and this month we'll be up and running. We have a full podcast studio that, uh, really excited about to get back in there and, uh, get going with it. Yeah. Hopefully there'll be beer over there and then I'll be there on every Thursday. There, there will be beer and food and everything else, uh, that like the web 2.0 companies offer. I think, you know, the web three companies are going to one up the web to like, I saw this thing on actually Facebook when it started and like how Facebook used to be

when like Mark Zuckerberg was working there. And like, it was pretty cool. Like they did a lot of stuff that a lot of companies are pretty commonplace now. Um, and, uh, pretty cool stuff. I know people knock them, but, but I think, you know, I mean, look what he's done. So meta. And did you know that Twitter? So Jack Dorsey bailed out a Twitter. Did you see that? Yeah. Yeah. I did see that. He's replaced by the previous CFO or something. CTO. Well, he went all in with square and then he changed the name of square to block blockchain. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. You can't deny it. It's a big deal. It's definitely a big deal. All right. Well, let's jump into this article. This article is for data driven insights to optimize your smart shopping campaigns. Uh, we got this off of search engine journal, uh, smart shopping campaigns and Google ads offer a number of benefits that advertisers find attractive, particularly those trying to manage product promotions at scale. Uh, that can be a challenge. It's a format that puts Google's machine learning to work for you. I hear a little feedback on your side. I think using your product feed to display ads across the Google search network, Google display network, YouTube, Gmail, and more having machine like the highlight. I could do. So, so, so, so, so the feedback, just so you know, is my caffeinated drink that was bubbling near my very powerful microphone. Oh, interesting. That is, that is a little, that is, that is not the technical answer I was expecting. If I'm honest, having machine learning, do the heavy lifting has potential downsides. Smart shopping can be something of a data black box for marketers. Uh, once you better understand the inputs and outputs of that black box, you can tinker with the input more effectively in this article, you're going to learn how to do just that. Uh, so smart shopping is, is really powerful. Yeah. You want to add something? Well, so, you know, for those

of you that are logging into Google or Facebook, you know that they're constantly changing things and they've really started to change the format of what kind of ads you can do. You can't do a lot more static ads. They want you to basically provide a bunch of different ad components and they're going to find the best combination. And then there's like considerations like you, like your brand logo might need to be on the image because it might not show up because the text might not, all your texts might not have that and the different kinds of formats. But we've been doing a lot of campaigns. Like I have a client right now and it's like 48 stores and we're running in each geographic area. And it's like, well, each, Oh, I I'm hearing the feedback now. Sorry. So, uh, you hear the feedback? Yeah. It, I felt it went away with the removal of the can, but again, that surprised me significantly. Maybe I'm getting other feedback, but, but if you're going to write and run thing on a campaign level versus a regional level versus a national level, and you're going to track stuff, you know, making sure that each say store location gets the right amount of, uh, ad dollars, um, you can't leverage the machine learning as well, right? Because you don't have as much data to put into it. Right. Right. And so there's a lot of things to consider, uh, spend wise, um, how much reach or, or, you know, I mean, how many people are going to see it to determine, uh, how to best use the machine learning. So there's certain times when you want to use it. And then there's certain times when, uh, you know, maybe a custom audience or look like audience, um, or, or really you want to just maybe focus a little bit better on targeting. Um, but again, it's like another tool in the tool belt. And, and so, but the machine learning is awesome and powerful. If you spend enough money

and you kind of spend at the certain thresholds, uh, we brought a, uh, cost per store visit when we started with the client about eight months ago from over $60 to under $5, Chris. Wow. And that's a lot that, I mean, there was other things that we were doing, but also machine learning had certainly a big part of that. So let it do, let it do its job. Yeah. All right. Before we jumped into this, uh, and I'm getting a little bit of feedback still, but do you have another window open or something? Uh, let's talk about different types of data. So the three things, three types of data, uh, talking about in this article is Google data and that's data you get back from Google. That's conversions, it's costs, it's impressions, uh, and then company data. And this is going to be more specific to your company, the particular products, that's the KPIs you want to focus on. It's insights such as, uh, margins, how much stock do you have? Because obviously you don't want to run ads on something that you're going out of stock. Uh, and then of course, all sorts of customer data. And then finally, you've got competition data. This is data about what is happening in your market. You know, a good example of this would be like SEM rush data. That, that type of data is, is the kind of Ahrefs data. Also Ahrefs data. And then I don't know if that's included in the free AWT, but at least on the paid version, you absolutely have, um, amazing, uh, uh, competitive data about again, your competition that felt redundant. Um, for examples, uh, on how turning data to insights can give you a headstart. And again, this is with your smart shopping campaigns, uh, number one, and they call this P O A S. So we're familiar with ROAS, right? R O A S return on ad spend. And they created something called P as or PO as, uh, which is profit on ad spend. Uh, you

could also call this ROI. Like that's what you could call this, uh, more and more advertising. Our advertisers are now using PO as again, profit on ad spend, understand profit by combining Google data. That's the cost data of the ads with company data. That's the margins data. And, and they went into some, some particular details about a situation where, um, really the ROI, the focus on the ROI is significantly better than the focus on the ROAS. And in their example, they've got really, it's a, it's a, it's a name brand purse. And then they've got a purse that they actually manufacture. Well, the margins are typically much higher when it's your own brand versus a brand that you're just selling. And the reality in this example is that from a return on ad spend, you, they ended up with about a 755% ROAS again, return on ad spend for the branded bag for their custom bag or for the in-house bag. They only had a 400% return on ad spend. And remember return on ad spend is how much did I spend and how much revenue did I generate? And then when you broke out, broke out, out PO as again, profit on ad spend, the branded bag only had like a 69% and the actual custom bag, the, the, the in-house bag had 137. So you can imagine you may, you may be spending, you may not be generating as much revenue, which could potentially give you a bad ROAS, but if you're making a lot more profit, then you're going to go with the ROI or the PO as hopefully I explained that. Well, you're muted. I think it happened to me too earlier. No, I did it because you said the feedback, right? But, but no, I, I pulled it up a little bonus for those that are watching and you know, by the way, I know a lot of people that are listening right to us. Like the majority of people listen to us, but you know what I've started to

do, Chris? Like, I know this is a total tangent, but I paid for like the YouTube, whatever, where there's no ads. And then I can do everything on YouTube. I can do videos, music, movies, whatever. Um, and so I've started to listen to podcasts too. And then, you know, someone could pull up a little diagram like this and you can see it and then you can go back to doing whatever you're doing. So just saying. In, in my case, I have so many tabs that are open. I have to like go find the tab where the YouTube video is playing and going, Oh, okay. I see that ROAS POAS. Okay. I get it. You told, you taught me about this, the little, the little down arrow that you can just scroll all the way down and see what it is. Like that is a game changer. And I've also started it. Well, I have three screens. Well, I have four screens, but I have a screen up top now that I like pin stuff too. Uh, so, so I don't get lost as much. So that's been helpful. Yeah. Yeah. Back to the article. Yeah. So, so it just makes sense. And, and really we've been talking about this forever in a day, which is, you know, we, we like to ask the question, what, what do you sell the most and what makes you the most profit, right? Because they may be very different and you don't want to lose the cells or the revenue generated from the thing you sell the most, but you do want to have a significant focus on the things that actually make you the most money. And we've been saying that, you know, since the dawn of this podcast, uh, which is, you know, a long time. All right. Number two, cross sell and upsell insights. Chris, we got to, we're going to have to make a like compilation video for you. Like, I mean, we did, we did a, you know, 10 year anniversary and, um, you

know, I w I want to see how well you've aged, like why I'm sure, you know, I think you probably look very similar to that, how you looked. Would you agree with that or disagree? Would your wife agree with that? I think it's, I think it's similar. Yeah. I, it's probably still, you still look like, I mean, like, I mean, yeah, like a 19 year old. I know. All right. So advertising on products, like this is the, what are we talking about? I got, I got lost here. Cross sell and upsell. So when you're talking about advertising on product a, it is also possible that in addition to selling product a, you also sell product B or actually do not sell product a at all, but only sell product C. So you want to be able to track those ad campaigns from the point where you actually have the click through into what, what actual revenue is, is created. Right. And we're talking about ROI product C can have a very different margin than product a. So again, back to actual profit and the upsell to product B may also be interesting from a margin technical point of view. And one of the things that we haven't shared yet is this article is sponsored by, uh, ad chief and they're really kind of promoting the value of seeing this specific data, uh, as it relates to, to smart shopping, uh, with ad chief. So what is your connection to ad chief? I mean, this is, this is promotion on top of promotion. Yeah. They got a good article. Like, and we, we're not, we're not hating on anything. Like it's a great article and we want to promote it. We have no connection to ad chief. Ad chief. Yeah. Um, they just have this good article and it's good to be thinking about, uh, about Google smart shopping and how you can manipulate that kind of black box experience that you have. All right. Number three, the effect of your price on rankings. So it's

not surprising that how you price your product, certainly everybody's aware of this in, in Amazon, you can sort by price lowest to highest or highest to lowest. Uh, and, and so what these guys did was focus and, and, and pull a bunch of data on, Hey, here's a product, here's a product and we're going to put it on Google and we're going to use smart shopping and we're going to price it between seven and 15% lower than the average price for that product. And then seven to 1% lower than the average product. And then right in the range of minus 1% to plus 1%. I'm just kind of defining these data points and then one to 7% and then seven to 15%. And they collected data in all these categories. You could imagine the difference in price would adjust how many clicks and there Matt has the data on the screen for us. Um, maybe zoom in on that. Uh, and, and so as they adjust the price, the lower price gets a lot more clicks, right? And a lot more impressions and then ultimately a lot more clicks. And what I found, which is interesting. And again, this goes back to staying focused on ROI. If you scroll to the next one, it isn't exactly the same in terms of conversion rates. So it's possible that you might have, uh, a higher price, which would result in less impressions, but ultimately a higher conversion rate, or at least a conversion rate on products that ultimately give you a higher ROI. So you really want to be breaking down this data on an ROI basis. So Chris, this kind of reminds me almost back to like some business coaching that, that you were doing a while back. Yeah. That was a lot. I keep hearing this feedback, sorry, but, but it talks about, well, you know, at a certain price, you're, you're getting to a certain result. And then if you raise your price by whatever it was, you want 15% of your prospects to

say it's too expensive, but you're basically for the same amount of work or for less, less work, you're getting paid the same amount. Right. And so this is, I think a loose analogy to that of basically there's like a sweet spot that you're trying to find on, uh, how much you should be charging versus what you're getting back in return. Right. Or I don't know, maybe I'd butcher that pretty bad, but in my head, it made sense. No, I mean, there's some really good points in that. Right. So, um, I, I, I do like the concept in the numbers 30%. If 30% of your customers aren't saying no, because of price, you're probably too inexpensive, right? At some point you want to be kind of maximizing profitability so that you've got a profitable business. And, and what that ultimately will mean is that some people are going to say no, because the price is too high. So that 30% is very interesting. Uh, the other one, and I was trying to pull something up, which is, I think it's typical that you can raise your price, um, 30%. And if you lose 50% of your customers, you're still at the same profit margin. I don't remember exactly what it is and I'm not going to do it on the fly, but there's a, there's a surprising, um, uh, ratio where you can raise your price a certain level and you actually have to lose a whole lot of customers to reduce your income. And what you end up doing is the same income, less work and better customers. Yeah. All I could think about was something called a public math that I, uh, was watching a podcast and people wouldn't do public math, but, but no, I, I just, I don't know. I think that this, this kind of highlights that you really need to be thinking about not just two dimensionally, Hey, we're going to spend this, we're going to get this right. There's different factors at play. I mean, we're not even talking

about, uh, the, the perception of your price. Like sometimes if you price something too low or too, too high, people will associate with value, right? Like different things that, um, factor in when you're making these kinds of determinations. And I just love being able to look at data and reading into that to see like what it's saying. Yeah. Yeah. And, and our, and our fourth point here is really entirely about ad chief. So it's talking about the insights that the software ad chief could provide based on like keyword insights. So based on the keywords and you do get this data because it is Google ads. So that, you know, the actual keywords that are being used, uh, you can understand the effect of the keywords on. So to guide you, to adjust your row as your return on, on, uh, spend a return on ad spend, uh, changes in your pricing proposition, the effects of improvement in your product scores, right? So you want to be improving the product score. So Google understands that customers like the product, the adjustment of the titles and the impact of newly added products on your rankings, right? So other people adding product products, how are those going to affect your rankings? And ultimately how is that going to affect your ROI? And, and he had actually a really good summary, uh, of this and it's success factors for managing campaigns differently. And we've been talking about this. This is really almost at the, well, really at the enterprise level. Um, step one, get clear on your business objectives. Like we've talked about this, you know, ad nauseum, uh, you know, I love the phrase, which is, uh, if you don't know where you're going, you're probably already there. Right. And, and if you don't want to be where you are, then you've got to have a target for where you're going. What are your business objectives? Uh, and make sure you get clear about those. I have absolutely never heard that phrase said that way, but I like

it. It works. Right. If you don't know where you're going, you're probably already there. Um, yeah. So get clear on your business objectives, never just throw money against the wall and see if it sticks. Uh, make sure you've got, uh, you know, I like the phrase, uh, there's test and measure. I actually like measure and test, which means, uh, you got to know what you're going to measure before you start to. So before you even again, start throwing money at the wall, know what is it that you're going to be measuring so that you're actually have a plan. Um, understand that the, these, these marketing decisions that you're making in this case, like smart shopping, it transcends the marketing department. And we've talked about this in probably the last five podcasts where we're talking, Hey, this is the confluence of all the departments in your, in your organization. It's, Hey, you know, how much inventory do you have? It's what pricing structure works the best. It's how do we reach out to the customers? Where do we find them? All of those have to work together. It's the it department. We did a whole podcast, uh, just from your article on speed, Matt, like all of these things have to work together well, uh, in order for you to have a successful campaign, be open to experimentation and learning, uh, and then not just taking directions. Right. And I know that with some of the campaigns you're managing right now, uh, there can be some challenges about like, Hey, we just want to do this. And you're like, Hmm, that may not be the right decision because of other factors. And you've got to have still this holistic view, um, put everything into practice with the right software. Of course, uh, they're going to mention that. And we know like, yes, software is incredibly important. It gives you amazing insights. Make sure you go check out, uh, AWT, AH refs webmaster tools. Um, and I think that we have the link and that link is

ahrefs.com forward slash AWT. There you go. Do you have anything to like summarize this? Well, um, I really do like this article because they added some true value and some true gems as well as data to what they were talking about. And it went in depth and it really outlined some stuff. And I really love it when you read articles and you're like getting something that you can take away from it and it's not just bare bones or it's like rehashed or something like that. Um, but I think a lot of the tips that they're sharing, um, are true words of wisdom that you should really consider. And a lot of these things, it's like, I just got to figure out what you're wanting to measure. Man, I'm getting it back. This is so annoying. I thought this might be fixed. It's not too bad on our end. I know you're probably getting it, just trying to ignore it. Well, we'll just see how hopefully when it like, you know, wraps it all together, hopefully it's pretty good. But, um, no, I, I think there's a lot of software out there that helps you, um, get helpful insights. And it certainly sounds like this tool does that. Uh, but really measuring, like you said, and then testing. So you've got to know what your business objectives are. You know, you gotta know what the campaign objectives are and you gotta know how do we track this where the data is clean. Right. And so getting the analytics set up is completely important. What are the goals? What are you trying to do? How does it roll up into the bigger business situation? These are all very, very important things. Um, and to just sum all this up, I guess, uh, I would sum it up with a somewhat of a testimonial for you, Chris. So we have a long time podcast listener that's been listening to approximately 10 years for 10 years. And he's been a client for going on, I think four years. He's

an enterprise level client. And, um, he liked what we were doing so much. Uh, he was learning so much from our team. He put in his official notice yesterday and he will be joining the team as one of our account managers starting in January. Yay. As for it's, it's, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty exciting. Uh, I had lots of conversations, uh, with him, uh, kind of over some good period of time. Uh, and then when you kind of joined and took the helm, you know, you started having good conversations with him and have been working with him. Would you say like two, two years now or something or actually four, four, four years. Wow. Um, and what a great, you know, one of the things I shared this with you, Matt is when you've got a customer who's great at marketing, right. It's harder to deliver, right? Like it's not harder for us cause that's what we do, but you're, you're held to a standard that a lot of companies can't survive. And then when that same person who's got great skills is like, Hey, yeah, I think I would like to join your team. It says a lot about his understanding and the quality of work that's being delivered to him and his team at that, at that position. It was just a, a, a phenomenal result. And so happy to have him joining the team. Yeah. So I thought that that was a good, uh, summary. All right. Well, this has been podcast number two, 528, 528. That's pretty amazing. Um, hopefully you guys enjoyed it. If you did get some value out of this one, we've talked about, Hey, there's, you know, uh, some video elements to it now, uh, go check it out on YouTube. If you're on YouTube, make sure you subscribe, make sure you hit that notification bell, uh, smash it, do whatever you got to do so that you can get notifications of when we launch our next podcast. And, uh, please go to ewrdigital.com forward slash, uh,

uh, review, and that'll take you to the review site. And we really appreciate all of you all until the next podcast. My name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.